In The Lair Of The Teutonic King - Talking Dragons, PS3 With Factor 5's Julian Eggebrecht

From the presentation, it feels like there is a lot of importance and focus being placed on Lair
on the Sony side. Sony always used to focus on exclusive titles, and
that's not as possible now with budgets people have. How important do
you think first- and second-party titles are to Sony's and the PS3's
future?

JE: I think they make all the difference. That's why it's important
that you have a strong first-party slate throughout the year. The fact
that the other games are multiplatform inherently means that most of
them probably won't take advantage of the platform the way they should.
That applies to both [the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3].

I'm sure that there are enough titles which come out on 360 because
they also have to be on the PS3, which don't even take full advantage
of the 360. It's a two-way street. That's the one thing where you
really have to show the strength of your system: with the first-party
exclusives.

Secondly, there's this generation's very interesting structure
regarding controllers. We've never had that before, that we've had so
vastly different controllers. And who else but first-parties will take
advantage of that in the way it should be?

It seems like a game like Lair would be relied upon to move system units, too, when you have multiple SKUs and other systems have been out longer.

JE: We've never designed like that. Lair is fresh in terms of
genre because it's a new genre - we call it "fight and flight" - and
using the controller actually came out of the fundamental design
involving dragons.

When the dragon thing happened, the motion control aspect was just a
glimpse on the horizon. It might have happened, it might have not
happened. I think we just lucked out, but on the other hand we also
always try to use every single feature in a new machine simply because
we get a kick out of it.

How far do you think there is to go, graphically, on PS3?

JE: It's huge. I think (PS3 GPU) RSX isn't a big secret. What's
really interesting is that we're starting these days in the
optimization process for Lair to use Cell to do certain things on the graphics side, which you normally wouldn't expect.

I think there is a huge room for growth. RSX, as well as the GPU in
the 360, are known quantities. Around the middle of the cycle, most
people will have figured out what you can do with them. But then you
suddenly have the connection between Cell and the SPUs and RSX, and you
can do a lot more with that, graphically.

How are you splitting stuff up to the SPUs? What sorts of things are you finding you're able to stick in there?

JE: We initially started out by saying, "Wow, we're going to do
physics," and everybody should do that at least. But it very quickly
became a matter of "oh, let's put this on the SPUs, and now let's put
this on there." We've got the fluid dynamics, all of the physics
including ragdoll, and all of the collisions.

In a game like Lair, if you've got a couple of thousand
soldiers running around and hundreds of dragons, one of the big issues
you have is a ton of collision checks, which other games simply don't
have. It's always been a big issue, and the SPUs are perfect for
number-crunching like that. Other things which you can do nicely on the
SPUs is to prepare tasks for the RSX, which normally you'd have to do
with the CPU, because the GPU really can't do it at that moment.

We've got a lot of things, including army AI. If you have primitive
AI for the distant armies, you can easily run that on the SPUs. As the
army comes closer and these guys need to get more intelligent, you move
the more intelligent army AI code onto the PPU.